"So, you're saying I should hold this broken umbrella and firmly believe it can drive the curse out of my body?"
Constantine looked at Schiller's old umbrella on the table, then looked up at Schiller. "Even if you weren't satisfied with the story I told, you didn't have to treat me like an idiot, did you?"
"I wasn't dissatisfied with the story you told." Schiller shook his head. "It wasn't particularly exciting, but it was better than nothing."
Schiller was telling the truth. That day, Constantine had revealed his entire plan to Batman and Schiller.
As expected, in the previous version of the story, he had still withheld part of the truth—namely, the part concerning Mrs. Sanchez.
"The Magic Circle in Cooper's room was indeed used by Ghost Mother to sacrifice children's souls, but we played a trick and cheated a demon."
"At the time, it wasn't just Cooper and me there. Laurenna was there too, and she was already pregnant. She had a child in her womb. She drew the Magic Circle for sacrificing a child's soul to a demon, then activated it, using the child in her belly as bait to lure the demon over."
"When the demon arrived, Laurenna and I told it that it had to pay first before we offered up the sacrifice. This was actually a common arrangement in demon deals. Some demons would even stuff power into you first, then come collect the debt..."
"That demon agreed, and the condition we gave it was that it had to kill Cooper and devour his soul. In an instant, the demon's power made Cooper's corpse fill the entire room. But what it didn't know was that I had also drawn another Magic Circle, with Cooper as the sacrifice."
"The demon drawn in by my other